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Happy Saint Nicholas Day! Jolly old St. Nick was a bishop in the early Catholic church – around 350 A.D. – in Greece. Legend has it that he was in the habit of throwing small bags of coins in through the windows of those in need. One of those bags happened to land in a child’s stocking. Word spread and others hung their stockings too in hopes that St. Nicholas “soon would be there”.

Nowadays, the Christmas stockings in our house are filled with chocolate bars, chocolate oranges, gift cards, and ear buds. Our cats get cat treats and catnip mice in their stockings.

As promised, here is a photo of our new house as seen from across the inlet. I guess we need to cut down a few dead trees.

For those who missed Monday’s blog post, my next book, Love and Turmoil, is available now for pre-order. (See how I made all those words into hotlinks to make is so incredibly easy for you to pre-order my next book? Aren’t I sneaky? All the marketing whizzes say to make buying easy, one-click, with lots of opportunities. Keep scrolling for a couple more. <grin>)

Six months after burying her wastrel husband, Lady Arabella Woodbridge has resigned herself to a lonely life in the countryside with only her two adopted nieces for company. Being a young, respectable widow is – frustrating. Then the charming and wickedly handsome Samuel Payn takes up residence in the neighboring manor house.

Retired explorer and occasional pirate Samuel Payn is on a two-fold mission – retrieve buried loot, and locate the father who abandoned his mother to a life of poverty. But a gang of murderous villains is also after the buried treasure. And someone is threatening to tear apart the lovely widow’s family.

For many years we’ve grown copious amounts of green beans, sweet peppers, and tomatoes to store in our deep-freeze. A small taste of summer makes the dreariest February day a little brighter. But even with our best efforts at manual vacuum packing (sucking the air out of the zipper locked bag using a drinking straw) we inevitably lost some produce to freezer burn.

Well, in this week’s flyer from Costco I saw a food saver on sale, as well as the required storage bags. Huzzah! No more freezer burn! We can also use it when we buy freezer orders of beef, pork and chicken – a fabulous way to save money. (I’d say we could freeze cookies for long-term storage but I don’t think the food saver works on baked goods…and who am I kidding? Cookies never last that long in this house.)

Now let’s see if we can leave the store with only the food saver in our shopping cart. Ha!​Oh, and since we’ll be in the big city we’ll swing by IKEA and scope out closet innards to furnish our new walk-in. One more item to check off our to-do list.

Bruno living dangerously in his favourite evening perch.

What are you up to this weekend? Do you shop at a big wholesale club store? Do you ever stick to your list?​Cheers!

We’re heading off the island today to check on the house construction progress, leaving Mum to mind the cats and catch up on her DVD viewing.

Then we’ll tackle a little (ha!) demolition project. You see, due to an error (pointing no fingers) the incorrect roof trusses for the garage were delivered and installed. Strangely, the truss company didn’t want them back. I couldn’t stand by and let all that new lumber get cut up and thrown away so I said we’d take it. They lifted the entire roof off in one piece and set it on the ground off to one side.

It looks like a small house!!

And it needs to be disassembled. So with the help of some friends, a chain saw, and a few pry bars, we’ll be salvaging enough wood to build a garden shed and a chicken coop. At least. Like I said, it’s a small house!

Do you have any ideas for what we can build with the leftover wood?​Here’s a sunrise from last week.

Happy Birthday to my dear hubby!!! I’m so glad he was born. I’ll be baking his “cake” today. Cake is in quotes because he prefers an apple pie for his special day. I bought a bag of locally grown MacIntosh apples, my preferred type of apple for baking, when we were in the Annapolis Valley earlier this week.​In other news, the house construction is coming along beautifully.

​I love love love the colours we chose and I can’t wait to get in there.